Webinars

Here you'll find an inventory of webinars, or recorded online meetings or presentations with OCLC Research staff. Each file is available in several ways: click the link for direct streaming and immediate viewing online or right-click to save the file to and view it from your own drive. These webinars are also available through our RSS feed and in the iTunes Store. New files will be updated regularly, so be sure to check back often.

Be sure to also check out our Technical Advances for Innovation in Cultural Heritage Institutions (TAI CHI) webinar series that covers new technologies and skills.

Please note: all times listed here are in U.S. Eastern Time, appropriate for the date of the event, unless otherwise noted. To convert these times to other time zones, we recommend the WorldClock Time Zone Converter.

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Upcoming webinars

Exclusively for OCLC Research Library Partners
This session will share New York Public Library’s (NYPL) efforts to assess, prioritize and develop long-term strategies for its audio and moving image (AMI) research collections, which are among the largest and most significant in the world. #orlp

Exclusively for OCLC Research Library Partners
Program Officer Dennis Massie will give an overview of how OCLC Research is analyzing five years’ worth of innovative collection sharing by the eleven members of the Borrow Direct consortium. #orlp

Exclusively for OCLC Research Library Partners
Staff at OCLC Research Library Partner institutions were invited to attend this webinar to learn more about how the Partnership works, how their institutions can benefit and how they can stay informed of and become involved with Partnership activities. #orlp

Exclusively for OCLC Research Library Partners
Staff at OCLC Research Library Partner institutions were invited to attend this webinar to learn more about how the Partnership works, how their institutions can benefit and how they can stay informed of and become involved with Partnership activities. #orlp

Exclusively for OCLC Research Library Partners
Staff at OCLC Research Library Partner institutions were invited to attend this webinar to learn more about how the Partnership works, how their institutions can benefit and how they can stay informed of and become involved with Partnership activities. #orlp

This webinar covered the functional requirements and recommendations for providing authoritative researcher identifiers as detailed in the Registering Researchers in Authority Files report. #oclcresearch #rrafreport

View this webinar recording to learn how a reinterpretation of Ranganathan's Five Laws of Library Science can help evolve both the work done by libraries and the perceptions of libraries and librarians. #rrreport

In this OCLC Research Distinguished Seminar Series presentation, Dan Cohen goes behind the scenes to discuss how the DPLA was created, how it functions as a portal and platform, what the staff is currently working on, and what's to come for the young project and organization. #ordss #dpla

This webinar features demonstrations of xEAC and RAMP, two tools that will help archivists and librarians explore new possibilities for name authority work, moving beyond the boundaries of traditional archival metadata. Tweet: #oclcr

This webinar provides an overview of how the international sharing partnership SHARES expands and enhances local collections with materials owned by OCLC Research Library Partners around the world. Tweet: #sharesill

In this webinar, Dr. Charles Kurzman, Professor of Sociology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill presents his research on changing academic attention to world regions over the past 50 years. Tweet: #oclcr #insightseries

This webinar provides an overview of ArchiveGrid, a collection of nearly two million archival material descriptions that is now freely available from OCLC Research, as well as related work. Tweet: #archivegrid

This webinar provides examples of how some of your colleagues are managing research data—the raw output of research investigations, not the resulting reports—including the context in which they are handling their goals, current activities and plans, as well as demonstrations of the systems they are developing. Tweet: #orlp

In this webinar, Program Officer Constance Malpas and Research Scientist Brian Lavoie present findings from their report, Print Management at "Mega-scale": a Regional Perspective on Print Book Collections in North America. Tweet: #ormega

Exclusively for OCLC Research Library Partners, this webinar provides a synthesis of the priorities and trends affecting US research libraries in the twenty-first century and the directions they are taking.

The Virtual International Authority File (VIAF) now comprises almost 20 million records from 24 different sources. In the last two months VIAF had over 70,000 visits from 147 countries/territories, with two-thirds "returning visitors." In addition, VIAF sees 6 million hits per month from automated systems such as Web harvesters or other programs retrieving VIAF information.

But how do people use VIAF? In this interactive WebEx session, five OCLC Research Library Partner staff did a "show and tell" to demonstrate their uses of VIAF:

Using VIAF as the primary reference for LC/NACO authority work to differentiate names— Spencer Anspach, Indiana University

Using VIAF to create a record in Fihrist, a multi-institutional Islamic manuscript catalog, incorporating the URI to an author's VIAF page— Alasdair Watson, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford

How VIAF helps researchers— Magda El-Sherbini, Ohio State University

Using VIAF to identify provenance of rare books and adding VIAF links to images of bookplates, inscriptions and other marks of ownership in Flickr— Regan Kladstrup, University of Pennsylvania

Using VIAF to identify issues in the VIAF matching process and how to respond and report them— Stephen Hearn, University of Minnesota

Program Officer Karen Smith-Yoshimura introduced and facilitated the session. Chief Scientist Thom Hickey was available to field questions about VIAF. Ample time was provided for Partner attendees to ask the "show and tellers" questions.

This webinar was open to OCLC Research Library Partners only, but the recording is freely available to all.

Links to the webinar recording and slides are available below. The webinar recording is also available in iTunes.

In this webinar, Lynn Silipigni Connaway, Ph.D., Senior Research Scientist at OCLC, and Marie L. Radford, Ph.D., Associate Professor, School of Communication & Information, Rutgers, discussed the key findings of their multi-year study that were recently published in the report, Seeking Synchronicity: Revelations and Recommendations for Virtual Reference .

These findings indicate that today's students, scholars and citizens are not just looking to libraries for answers to specific questions—they want partners and guides in a lifelong information-seeking journey. By transforming virtual reference (VR) services into relationship-building opportunities, libraries can leverage the positive feelings people have for libraries in a crowded online space where the biggest players often don't have the unique experience and specific strengths that librarians offer.

Specific details that Connaway and Radford discussed in the webinar include:

Rapid Capture in Special Collections and Archives #orrapcap for OCLC Research Library Partners only

The report, Rapid Capture: Faster Throughput in Digitization of Special Collections, focused on the actual moment of digitization of non-book materials and on innovative ways to speed things up. But speeding things up in one part of the process often uncovers bottlenecks in other parts. In this webinar, experts from special collections and archives offered up creative ways to speed up other parts of the process to provide greater access to special collections, including:

Nimble workflows that allow multiple streams of manuscript content to be scanned and presented online quickly— Laura Clark Brown, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Re-using archival description, or: our metadata is only as good as our descriptive practice— Ben Goldman, University of Wyoming

The quick and the good: outsourcing rapid capture of special collections— Mary Elings, University of California, Berkeley

A planned destructive scanning process designed to create digitally reformatted copies that join their born-digital counterparts and are accessed and preserved as a single format— Erik Moore, University of Minnesota

A system, paired with rapid capture, to provide access to entire folder content through the finding aid— Brian Wilson, The Henry Ford

Ample time was provided for attendees to discuss how to scale up special collections digitization with their colleagues from the OCLC Research Library Partnership.

Links to the webinar recording, slides and chat transcript are available below. The webinar recording is also available in iTunes.

and other members of the Streamlining Photography and Scanning Working Group

Scan and Deliver: Creative User-initiated Digitization in Special Collections and Archives #orscan

Are you ready to say, "Yes, we scan!"? This webinar was all about sharing streamlined methods for scanning and delivering digital copies of special collections materials at the request of users.

Changes in technology and the increased visibility of special collections have resulted in a deluge of requests for digital copies of special collections materials. A steady stream of digitization requests for one item here, two pages there can be labor-intensive, and policies for user requests vary widely across institutions.

To address these issues, OCLC Research and the OCLC Research Library Partnership's Working Group on Streamlining Photography and Scanning sought methods for reducing cumbersome digitization-on-demand workflows and policy obstacles. The Scan and Deliver report concludes that a flexible, tiered approach to delivering digitized copies acknowledges differences in user needs, collections, institutional policies, and resources.

This webinar featured creative experiments aimed at scanning and delivering user-requested digital copies of special collections materials. San Diego State University offers self-serve scanning in their reading room. At the University of Chicago, special collections and interlibrary loan (ILL) colleagues are working together to use existing infrastructure and expertise. The Getty Research Institute developed a tiered approach to capture and post digital files created by fulfilling user requests. Speakers discussed workflows-in-progress, lessons learned, and how they learned to stop worrying and love digital copy requests.

OCLC Research Library Partnership Orientation Webinars for OCLC Research Library Partners only

New, returning and continuing OCLC Research Library Partners were encouraged to attend one of these webinars to find out how to get the most out of OCLC Research Library Partnership affiliation. These webinars covered a variety of communications vehicles Partners can use to receive information about the OCLC Research Library Partnership, as well as ways they can access outputs that showcase the progress of our work, such as reports, webinars and presentations. Also included were ways Partners can take advantage of the many benefits of Partnership, the types of opportunities they can engage in, and the different ways in which they can contribute to the Partnership.

A recording of the 16 August webinar is available below and in iTunes.

In this webinar, Program Officer Jackie Dooley provides an overview of the project in which 275 institutions across the U.S. and Canada were surveyed to determine norms across the community and to provide data to support decision-making and priority setting. She also holds an open discussion about the implications of the survey results for the special collections and archives community, as well as major outcomes and recommended action items from the report, Taking Our Pulse: The OCLC Research Survey of Special Collections and Archives in Academic and Research Libraries (.pdf: 1.5MB/153 pp.).

Globally and nationally, book publishing represents a central kind of cultural heritage. In this webinar, OCLC Research Post-Doctoral Researcher Timothy J. Dickey provides an overview of an OCLC Research data mining project that looked at books as expressions of global cultural diversity to provide a global overview of the publishing arts. In this project, researchers considered the overall annual publishing for every country of the world, the libraries that collect and even import a country's works, the "foreign" monographs their libraries import, and the proportion of publications in various official and native languages. These efforts produced a rich data portrait of the global literary arts (as reflected library records in the WorldCat database), with emphasis on cultural literary heritage by country and region and includes a wealth of case studies in single countries' practices in both literary publishing and the preservation of their literary heritage.

Managing Collections in the Networked Environment: New Analytic Approaches

In this webinar, Program Officer Constance Malpas and a panel of young library leaders discuss the role of data analysis in library collection management and provide examples of how they're putting aggregated library data to work in their daily operations. Staff from three RLG Partner institutions share insights from research that is reshaping preservation, access and management practices at Columbia University, the University of Michigan and the University of California, Los Angeles.

Featured projects include a longitudinal analysis of circulation trends at Columbia that is informing off-site storage transfers; a study of post-digitization use of print collections at the University of Michigan; and a project to streamline preservation workflows at UCLA by automating selected aspects of risk assessment.

Zack Lane (Columbia University), Helen Look (University of Michigan) and Jake Nadal (University of California, Los Angeles) describe how these projects were designed and executed, and share their experiences in developing new institutional capacity for data-driven analyses.

This 90-minute session includes an open discussion about the opportunities and challenges of implementing data-driven management strategies and retooling the library workforce.

To make the RLG Partnership available beyond ALA attendees, we once again held the RLG Partnership Update Session before ALA as virtual meeting via WebEx. In thie webinar, OCLC Research program officers and research scientists gave reports on relevant projects recently completed or underway to enable RLG Parnters to learn about our current work and discover ways to become more engaged in the RLG Partnership. The roster of presenters and topics included:

Jim Michalko: Highlights from his recent report, Research Libraries, Risk and Systemic Change

Brian Lavoie: An overview of how OCLC Research provides support for external researchers

Constance Malpas: An overview of her work on the Cloud Library activity

Lynn Silipigni Connaway and Timothy J. Dickey: A review of their work featured in recent JISC reports

Jennifer Schaffner: An overview of her work with the Research Information Network

Karen Smith-Yoshimura: Highlights of ways to transition with and Beyond MARC

Jean Godby: An overview of her work related to name disambiguation

Jackie Dooley: Recommendations from her forthcoming OCLC Research report on special collections and archives

Ricky Erway: An overview of the Well Intentioned Practices document for putting for putting digitized collections of unpublished materials online

This webinar was one of three an amplified sessions that were livecast from the 2010 Annual RLG Partnership Meeting.

In this webinar, OCLC Research program officer Karen Smith-Yoshiumura provided a recap of an RLG Partners working group's findings from gathering and analyzing evidence over the past two years about MARC tag usage to inform library metadata practices. She expanded on their conclusion that MARC data cannot continue to exist in its own discrete environment and will need to be leveraged and used in other domains to reach users in their own networked environments. The discussion focused on the next steps to transition beyond MARC and have our metadata part of the semantic Web.

This webinar was one of three an amplified sessions that were livecast from the 2010 Annual RLG Partnership Meeting.

In this webinar, Dennis Massie and Jennifer Schaffner from OCLC Research, as well as Paul Contstantine from University of Washington and Jon Shaw from University of Pennsylvania, provided an overview of how two RLG Partnership working groups are modeling sustainable workflows for delivery of special collections via "digitization on demand" and interlibrary sharing. They also engaged the audience in a discussion about the radical rift among experienced professionals about whether sharing special collections is even a good idea. (The four speakers definitely think it IS a good idea.)

This webinar was one of three an amplified sessions that were livecast from the 2010 Annual RLG Partnership Meeting.

In this webinar, OCLC Research RLG Partnership European Director John MacColl provided an overview of a new activity related to data curation that OCLC Research recently kicked off in support of the RLG Partnership, focusing on a joint OCLC Research-LIBER series of case studies in data curation needs in the humanities and social sciences in a range of university libraries in Europe, Australia and North America. He also requested input from RLG Partners on this project, and on data curation roles for libraries in general, throughout the presentation.

In this webinar, OCLC research scientist Brian Lavoie talks about the economic challenges of long-term digital preservation, based on the work of the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access (which he co-chaired). Brian discusses the findings and recommendations from the Task Force's recently-published final report, Sustainable Economics for a Digital Planet(.pdf: 4MB/116 pp.), and also provides a report on the discussions which took place at the 1 April symposium, A National Conversation on the Economic Sustainability of Digital Information held in Washington, DC, as well as a parallel symposium held on 6 May in London. The goal of this webinar is to update participants on the latest thinking on building economically sustainable digital preservation activities.

Theft and loss of materials held in libraries and archives worldwide is a concern not only for owning institutions, but also for the international antiquarian book trade and global law enforcement. Centralized, highly-visible exposure of "missing materials" is needed to help identify stolen materials, recover missing items and deter future crimes. Together with the RLG Partnership, the RBMS Security Committee and the ABAA, OCLC Research developed MissingMaterials.org, a free mechanism for sharing reliable information about missing rare books and other materials at the network level. In order for this solution to work, however, it is of vital importance that the community use it.

This webinar was held twice, at 10 am and 4 pm EDT, to accommodate attendees in different time zones.

All who share an interest in reducing the environmental impact of interlibrary loan operations were invited to attend this webinar in which Dennis Massie, OCLC Research program officer and author of the upcoming report, Greening ILL Practices, discussed a study of current resource sharing practices recently undertaken by a team of environmental impact consultants. Utilizing data provided by OCLC and gathered during interviews with staff at a dozen US libraries, the consultants were able to correlate specific interlending practices with measurable impacts on greenhouse gas emission levels. Dennis discussed the key recommendations indicated by the data and shared best practices already in place at several participant libraries. Attendees were also encouraged to share their own techniques for greening ILL operations.

Users are puzzled that they can search Internet resources through a single search engine query, yet the resources of university campuses and cultural heritage institutions are often segregated into a plethora of silos, each with its own dedicated search. The aspiration of rationalizing search across institutional library, archive and museum (LAM) collections surfaced as a central concern at all five Beyond the Silos of the LAMs workshops, and in many of the subsequent presentations, events and interactions with the RLG Partnership. In this webinar, four presenters who have implemented Single Search at each of their institutions discussed emerging practices in the local aggregation of library, archive and museum collections, with a particular emphasis on successful strategies and dead ends.

In this webinar, some of the authors of the recently published report, Implications of MARC Tag Usage on Library Metadata Practices (.pdf), presented evidence gathered and analyzed by the RLG Partnership MARC Tag Usage Working Group to inform library metadata practices, with a focus on machine applications.

A transcript of the webinar chat (.pdf) is provided below as a supplement to the recordings.

Undue Diligence: Seeking Low-risk Strategies for Making Collections of Unpublished Materials More Accessible

In this 11 March meeting, copyright experts, practitioners and staff from OCLC Research agreed on what is a reasonable approach to rights when making digitized collections of unpublished materials accessible via the Web. The meeting was broadcast live for remote participants via WebEx and resulted in the following three recordings. Complete meeting details are available on the Undue Diligence event page.

In this webinar, authors of the report, Over, Under, Around, and Through: Getting Around Barriers to EAD Implementation (.pdf) discuss EAD's value as a key element of successful archival information systems, as well as ways to help overcome potential barriers to its implementation. They also discussed key points from the report, framed obstacles that archivists have experienced adopting Encoded Archival Description and suggested pathways to help get out of the ruts, around the roadblocks, and on the road to success. Participants also shared their own problems and solutions.

This work is an output of the Barriers to Using EAD project undertaken by OCLC Research and the RLG Partnership.

To make the RLG Partnership available beyond ALA attendees, we moved the RLG Partnership Update to new time and format—we held it before ALA as virtual meeting. Program officers gave reports on relevant projects recently completed or underway. This webinar provided a great opportunity for institutions to learn about current work and discover ways to become more engaged in the RLG Partnership.

Basil Dewhurst Manager of Resource Discovery Services at the National Library of Australia and EAC Working Group Member

Daniel Pitti EAC Schema Chief Architect

EAC-CPF Webinars

EAC-CPF (EAC for short) is a communications structure (XML schema) for archival contextual information. EAC records are akin to traditional MARC authority records, while also enabling inclusion of much greater contextual information, such as biographical information about people and administrative history of governmental and private organizations. EAC records would complement and be linked to EAD (Encoded Archival Description) descriptions of particular archival collections. Imagine EAC records as a new data source about entities that produce archival and manuscripts materials. In addition, they can provide meaningful links to related access points in many domains. EAC's capabilities enable important steps toward an archival component of the Semantic Web. Learn more about EAC, the EAC schema and the tag library.

To provide additional information on EAC-CPF, OCLC Research, the RLG Partnership and the EAC Working Group recently held two EAC-CPF webinars in which archivists, authorities librarians, system developers and linked-data geeks discussed the draft EAC-CPF standard (Encoded Archival Context—Corporate Bodies, Persons and Families). In these webinars, Katherine Wisser, chair of the international EAC Working Group, introduced the EAC-CPF standard and then took questions from participants. Basil Dewhurst, Manager of Resource Discovery Services at the National Library of Australia and member of the EAC Working Group, also participated in the discussion during the 3 November webinar. Daniel Pitti, chief architect of the EAC schema, participated in the discussion of the 8 October webinar.

Names are ambiguous and take different forms depending on context. Information sufficient to identify and distinguish people and organizations is widely dispersed. In this webinar, members of the Networking Names Advisory Group talk about the following:

highlights from the recent Networking Names report—requirements derived from fourteen use case scenarios for a "Cooperative Identities Hub" that would provide a framework to concatenate authoritative information and a gateway to all forms of names using a social networking model

the "problem space" of dispersed information about names within one institution

WorldCat Identities and the Virtual International Authority File as examples of applications that incorporate some of the Hub components

the work of the Names Project in the UK

the Encoded Archival Context work

the NISO Institutional Identifier working group, including mapping its own data attributes to the Identities Hub requirements

This is a recording of an amplified session that was livecast from the 2009 RLG Partnership Annual Meeting. The introduction did not get captured so this recording begins on slide one.

In this webinar, Brian Lavoie talks about the economic challenges of long-term digital preservation. He frames out digital preservation as an economic problem, describes the work of the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access (which he co-chairs), and discusses some of the Task Force's findings to date. Participants also share their thoughts and perspectives in a discussion that follows the presentation. The goal of this session is to give participants a better understanding of the economic issues involved in building sustainable digital preservation activities.

This is a recording of an amplified session that was livecast from the 2009 RLG Partnership Annual Meeting.

In this webinar, Constance Malpas and Dennis Massie review progress in several OCLC Research projects focused on collaborative management of library print collections, and highlight efforts that have been driven by institutions in the RLG Partnership. They also discuss a range of projects planned for the coming program year aimed at creating new operational efficiencies for research libraries. The session includes discussion and commentary by current participants and those who are interested to collaborate in upcoming initiatives.

This is a recording of an amplified session that was livecast from the 2009 RLG Partnership Annual Meeting. The introduction did not get captured so this recording begins on slide two.

In this webinar, Ricky Erway and Constance Malpas recap the findings from a literature review on scholarly information practices and some of the disciplinary differences. They also talk about a few activities that build on those findings that are underway (at RLG partner institutions and as RLG Partnership projects), then open the floor for discussion about what partners doing as well as possibilities for future collaboration.

Treasures on Trucks and Other Taboos: Rethinking the Sharing of Special Collections

In this webinar, Program Officers Jennifer Schaffner and Dennis Massie present background information on the often controversial topic of loaning archives and special collections materials. In addition, two pairs of Special Collections and SHARES ILL librarians discuss issues and experiences. Naomi Nelson and Margaret Ellingson from Emory University speak from the perspective of an institution that's been loaning successfully for years. Cristina Favretto and Scott Britton from the University of Miami bring the perspective of being new to the discussion and just starting to consider the issues before coming to a decision about whether and how to make their materials more widely available. The phone and chat lines are then opened for frank conversation and compelling questions. Loan of special collections materials is a challenging topic, and this webinar helps move the conversation forward.

In this webinar, Merrilee Proffitt and Bill Carney provide background on the work that has been undertaken to contribute to the development of the WorldCat Copyright Evidence Registry. Merrilee and Bill also provide a demonstration of this pilot and talk about the current focus of establishing best practices for using the "rules engine" to codify determining what, for a given institution, is in or out of scope.

The WorldCat Copyright Evidence Registry will enable the creation and sharing of copyright evidence through a collaboratively created and maintained database. A side benefit of the project may be the community collaborating to define a consistent, accepted process for libraries to gather and document copyright evidence in order to provide access to digitized materials.

In this webinar, Roy Tennant and Bruce Washburn provide an overview of WorldCat Search API features. Launched in August 2008, the WorldCat Search API provides OCLC libraries with new ways of taking advantage of the WorldCat database and features. With the API, you can build WorldCat search results, metadata, and links to library catalogs into your own systems. Supporting common search protocols like OpenSearch and SRU, and delivering data in standard formats like RSS, Atom, Dublin Core and MARC, the API is ready to be applied to a wide array of applications.

Two versions of this webinar are available: Using the WorldCat Search API (with Q&A) is a recording of the 27 August webinar that includes questions from partners but in which technical difficulties prohibited Roy and Bruce from demonstrating current applications that use the API as originally planned. Because of this, an additional webinar was recorded, Using the WorldCat Search API (with Demos) that does contain these demonstrations but does not contain a question and answer session. This revised webinar is also available in the iTunes Store.

In this webinar, Merrilee Proffitt and Jennifer Schaffner discuss metrics within special collections. Jen provides selected usage statistics gathered in special collections from 1995 to the present, and Merrilee covers the spectrum of possibilities for measuring use. Then they both raise some new issues and take comments and questions from participants to increase awareness about measuring special collections impact in libraries, archives and museums.

Assessing Uniqueness in the System-wide Book Collection: Preliminary Results from a Study of WorldCat

As space pressures on library print collections increase, and mass digitization efforts begin to challenge the primacy of locally-held print inventories, new attention has been directed to collection assessment in research libraries. Further, notions about the importance of and definitions for "uniqueness" have become discussion topics in a variety of venues, particularly in the context of long-tail economics.

In this webinar, Constance Malpas gives an update on recent research on the distribution and content characterization of unique print books represented in the WorldCat database. RLG partners have been a critical part of this research project, contributing both local expertise and data, and providing insights on how different measures of "uniqueness" can shape local and group collection management efforts.

Out of the Stacks and onto the Desktop: Rethinking Assumptions about Access and Digitization

Ricky Erway and Jennifer Schaffner provide a brief overview of the outcomes of two recent initiatives undertaken by RLG Programs with contributions from staff at many partner institutions that resulted in the following reports:

We are a worldwide library cooperative, owned, governed and sustained by members since 1967. Our public purpose is a statement of commitment to each other—that we will work together to improve access to the information held in libraries around the globe, and find ways to reduce costs for libraries through collaboration.